Category Archives: magazines

Magazines should be investing more effort in developing their online communities because they represent an increasingly important “strategic resource,” according to new research.

The research, “Audience Community as a Strategic Resource in Media Work” by Nando Malmelin and Mikko Villi, identifies two main advantages that publishers gain when working actively with their audience community:

And secondly it gives journalists a deeper understanding and knowledge of their audience, making them quicker to respond to trends and better at identifying stories they know will interest that audience.

The researchers looked in particular at two successful magazines in Finland: Demi (aimed at 12-19 year old girls) and Lily (aimed at women aged 18-39).

The magazines’ two websites reach 75% and 45% of their respective target audiences, and benefit from highly active communities that actively feed into the editorial process.

As one interviewee puts it:

“If we didn’t have a community producing contents and subjects that they themselves are interested in 24/7, we wouldn’t be able to keep up to speed on what’s important to our target audience.”

4 roles in community collaboration

But collaborating with audience communities requires new kinds of journalistic practices, and the researchers identify 4 different roles that journalists adopt in this respect:

Observer

Developer

Facilitator

Curator

The observer monitors the audience community’s discussions to identify interests, needs and concerns.

The developer helps improve the online platform(s) and service so that users are more likely to contribute.

The facilitator helps start and maintain online discussions and feed those back to the editorial team. The emphasis is on stimulating, rather than driving, as one journalist points out:

“We can’t interfere too much. The biggest mistake we could make would be to decide amongst ourselves what we like at the moment and what other professionals respect and what’s in vogue for our industry, that’s perhaps the pitfall we fall into every now and then.”

Finally, the curator might highlight the best work by members of the community, both online and in print.

You might not have a community yet

Magazines are typically in a better position than newspapers when it comes to developing audience communities, and readers of speciality publications (for example hobby magazines) tend to have a stronger attachment to the brand than generic magazines – but that doesn’t mean that all magazines have a community:

“When audience members have more regular communication amongst themselves, they can be said to form an actual community; otherwise atomized media consumers simply form a crowd.”

The key question for publishers, then, may be to what extent that communication between users exists – and where.

Community management specialists such as Richard Millington tend to warn against the tendency to launch technically impressive platforms without consideration of the cultures of communities themselves. Sometimes it makes more sense to participate in existing communities than try to recreate them (another option, taken by some publishers, is to buy blog networks).Meanwhile Malmelin and Villi settle for recommending that:

“Media organisations should invest increasing effort in creating and managing audience communities … the successful operation of the media industry should in many cases be in fact as much about content production as it is about facilitating the maintenance of social relations among and with its audience.”

Before the internet made it easier for advertisers to become publishers, they were already growing tired of the limitations (and inflated price) of traditional display advertising. In the magazine industry one of the big growth areas of the past 20 years was client publishing: helping – to varying degrees – companies create magazines which were then given or sold to customers, staff, members, or anyone interested in their field.

While the execution varies, the idea behind it is consistent: this is no longer about selling content, or audiences, but expertise – and quite often expertise in distribution as much as in content production. Continue reading →

Magazine Editing is one of those books that I’ve used for years in my teaching. Unlike most books in the field, it has a healthy focus on the less glamorous aspects of running magazines, such as managing teams and budgets, editorial strategy, and the significant proportion of the industry – B2B, contract publishing, controlled-circulation, subscription-based – that you don’t see on supermarket shelves.

Although it now has my name on it, the book remains primarily the work of John Morrish, who wrote the first two editions of the book. Editing his work gave me a fresh appreciation of just what a timeless job he has done in identifying the skills needed by magazine editors – as I write in the introduction:

“It is striking how much of the advice in the book is more important than ever. In a period of enormous change it is key to focus on the core skills of magazine editing: clear leadership, effective management, people skills and creative thinking around what exactly it is that your readers are buying into – whether that’s printed on paper, pixels on a screen, or something intangible like a sense of community and belonging.”

So if you can find one of the older editions cheap, you’ll still find it useful.

So what did I add to the new edition of Magazine Editing? It goes without saying that digital magazines (web-only, apps) are now covered. The diversification of revenue models – the increased importance of events, merchandising, data, mobile and apps – is now explored, as well as how online advertising works, and how it differs from traditional advertising. How to use online resources, including web analytics, to better understand your audience and inform your editorial strategy; and how magazine campaigns are changed by the dynamics of the web.

The chapter on leading and managing now includes sections on managing information overload, social bookmarking and social media policies, and there’s a new section on legal guidance on placements and internships. The budgeting sections now include online considerations, and there’s an exploration of the pros and cons of using free or minimal cost third party services against building tools in-house. A passage from the section on ‘Making money online’ is illustrative of the shifts facing the industry:

“Like so much else on the web, it is becoming difficult to see where content ends and commerce begins. The concept of a ‘magazine’ blurs when, online, it can also be a shop, a game, or a tool. It helps to think of how the business model of magazines has traditionally worked: gathering a community of people in the same place (on your pages) where companies can then advertise their products and services. The same principle applies now, but the barriers to selling products and services yourself have been significantly lowered, just as the barriers to publishing content have been significantly lowered for those companies whose advertising used to fund print publishing. Integrity is no less important in this context: users will desert your website if your content is only concerned with selling them your products, just as they will desert if your events are badly organised, your merchandise poor quality, or your service shoddy. Publishers increasingly talk of a ‘brand experience’ of which the content is just one part. In many ways this makes the reader – as they also become a consumer – more powerful, and the advertiser less so. Your insights into what they are talking and reading about may be of increasing interest to those who are searching for new revenue streams.”

The chapter on writing covers considerations in evaluating online sources of information and the debates in online journalism around objectivity versus transparency, and the values of a ‘web-first’ strategy. I also cover online tools for organising diaries and monitoring social media. There’s an exploration of best practice guidelines in writing for the web, and when multimedia is appropriate or preferable.

The chapter on pictures and design now includes advice on dealing with web designers and developers, multiplatform design and branding, sourcing video for the web, copyright and Creative Commons, infographics, and image considerations for online publication. And ‘Managing Production’ covers search engine optimisation, scheduling online production, and online distribution. The penultimate chapter on legal considerations adds data protection, the role of archives in contempt of court, and website terms and conditions.

I end the book with a list of tools that allows the reader to get publishing right now. And aside from the legal developments, the new considerations, roles and stages in the production cycle, this is perhaps the most important change from previous editions: a student reading this book is no longer waiting for their first job in publishing: they should be creating it.

If you have read the book and want to receive updates on developments in the magazine industry, please Like the book’s Facebook page. I’d also welcome any comments on areas you think are well covered – or need to be covered further.

Given I’ve already linked to Tony Hirst twice this week I thought I’d make it a hat-trick. Last month Tony wrote two blog posts which I thought were particularly instructive for magazine publishers organising blog awards.

“Why, oh why, don’t publishers of blog award nomination lists see them as potentially useful collections on a particular subject that can be put to work for the benefit of that community?

“… There are umpteen categories – each category has it’s own web page – and umpteen nominations per award. To my mind, lists of nominations for an award are lists of items on a related topic. Where the items relate to blogs, presumably with an RSS feed associated with each, the lists should be published as an OPML file, so you can at-a-click subscribe to all the blogs on a list in a reader such as Google Reader, or via a dashboard such as netvibes. Where there are multiple awards, I’d provide an OPML file for each award, and a meta-bundle that collects nominations for all the awards together in a single OPML file, though with each category in its own nested outline element.”

I’d suggest something even more simple: an aggregator widget pulling together the RSS feeds for each category, or a new Twitter account, or a Google Reader bundle.

In a second post the following day Tony finds a further way to extract value from the list: use Google Custom Search to create a custom search engine limited to those sites you have shortlisted as award-worthy. His post explains exactly how to do that.

Tony’s approach demonstrates the difference between story-centred and data-centred approaches to journalism. Computer Weekly are approaching the awards as a story (largely because of limitations of platform and skills – see comments), with the ultimate ending ‘Blog publisher wins award’. Tony, however, is looking at the resources being gathered along the way: a list of blogs, each of which has an RSS feed, and each of which will be useful to readers and journalists. Both are valid, but ignoring either is to miss something valuable in your journalism.